


resprise

by beaureqard



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 04:41:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5695174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaureqard/pseuds/beaureqard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the hosnian system was the capital and core of the new republic; the hosnian system is <i>gone.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	resprise

Thirty years of slow, hard work, gone in an instant. Not quite an instant. It would have been better if it were an instant but god, god, god, you could see how each planet broke apart from two systems away: just slow enough to feel, to fear, but not so slow that anyone on those planets would have had time to call home. The cruelest pace is the one you can see, but not stop. 

People probably died in their bathrooms, in their beds, after one long terrible instant of implosion. Earth-shattering is the only adjective, really, for that kind of death.

Leia wonders who, like her, had the fortune to be off-world at the time. Those attending to senate business, those home sick, those who didn’t so much care about the bills tabled today, those running for reelection and busy with campaigning. How many senators? How many _friends?_ Maybe gentle Irea is safe, or Mehra, whose voice is--was?--a force of nature. Perhaps stubborn old Shem decided to tend to their garden today, perhaps Ido wanted to stay home with her daughter, her daughter, the little girl she’d always brought to the senate in a sling in those early years, whose tiny round cheeks and quiet coos had always reminded leia of her own son, of--

She hopes, perversely, that Ben had known what was coming. That he had seen it, that he had time to prepare himself for the onslaught of _billions_ stretching the very fabric of the universe with their departure. Leia had felt it from Takodana, though she had never been formally trained and usually felt only the anguish of her own family; it must have been truly, truly awful for those with wider breadth of sensitivity. The entirety of the Force had quaked with it, so many simultaneous acquisitions, so many screaming goodbyes. Has everyone gone to the right place, she wonders, thinking wryly--with a humor that only comes from long practice at watching things die--of a Corellian man suddenly finding himself in the hushed forests of an Ewok afterlife. 

So many soldiers, gone, anchored with a fleet now more at one with the stars than any fleet should be. So many libraries, so many schools; so many _children._

Luke must have felt it, even hidden as he is. Or perhaps he’s succeeded in what he maybe always wanted, to hide himself away from the Force itself, to find a final sort of peace. 

Luke’s ghosts must have felt it, too, the old old men he sometimes told her about. How they glowed, though she had never cared even to imagine them, let alone see them. She had been so busy, in those early years, raising an infant and a democracy and never quite sure which she should mother more, and then Luke was gone and then Luke was _gone_ and she had never gotten the chance to ask again, about the ghosts.

Leia wishes she had seen the ghosts. To have something to imagine, now, some clear image of several billion glowing lights ascending from the ashes of the Republic’s very core and spreading, dissolving, using the visible plane only as a waypoint to bigger, better things. Maybe Luke’s ghosts had left him, just for a moment, to shepherd the newly dead.

You cannot make planets anew (Leia knows, Leia _tried,_ but imagining her childhood home with the furious concentration of youth had never been enough) and you cannot make stars anew and you can only make governments anew if you have enough people to fill them. Leia wonders, trying to be idle, trying not to reel in horror, if some council scribe is now the president of her entire world due to some fucked-up succession of command. Leia wonders if the scribe will rise to her challenge. Leia wonders what the newest worlds will do, those most recently entered into the fledgling republic, when they realize that the promised ships and men and food are no longer forthcoming. Leia wonders when the looting will begin. Leia wonders when she became so well acquainted with the thrumming metal floor of the ship, when her knees began sending out those throbbing pains. 

The _loss_ of it all, real and imagined and real again; the _wreckage._

And when this war ends, as all wars do, she will simply have to start again. 

She rises, regal even in her agony--regal _because_ of her agony--and waits for the ship to dock in front of the wasted cantina.

**Author's Note:**

> kinda short but the movie didn't really include this at all, so. might write more if i feel like it, calling back to alderaan's destruction thirty years prior. i don't actually know that much about star wars or space politics, can you tell? come talk to me about star wars and pain at tumblr (aciculate.tumblr.com) or twitter (@broregard)


End file.
